[Wag the Dog is a brilliant, disturbing, watershed film which never fails to reduce me to helpless giggling like the Marx Brothers did when I was twenty, even as I hear the Wolf growling in my ear–something about if you see me running you know my life is at stake. David Marcus’ brief essay is pulled-punch pablum, but it’s the first semi-coherent affirmation of points I made all last year that I’ve seen appear anywhere near the mainstream. I’m linking it because its platitudes were knowable, even obvious, twenty years ago. Until everybody done went and forgot. Read it by all means, but don’t worry, Trump’s still not the Devil you don’t believe in. He’s not even the first sign that Devil you don’t believe in has turned ’round (for that, see Wag the Dog below). He’s just the latest sign that it’s the Devil who has his hand around your throat and he doesn’t care whether you believe in him or not.]

For twenty years now, two kinds of people have existed in America (and perhaps much of the rest of the world). There are those who have seen Wag the Dog and kept it continuously in mind and those who haven’t.

The latter seem to be continuously surprised. There is always some bar or other–cultural, social, economic, political, even military (as in “surely we can’t lose this one”)–which they are shocked and saddened to learn has been once more lowered.

They’re always certain, it seems, that the last time was the last time.

The film’s director, Barry Levinson (one of America’s best for a generation when this was released, a nonentity since), refers to the film as “cynical” in his DVD commentary, which is, among other things, an interesting exercise in ass-covering.

He’s joined on the commentary track by the film’s star, Dustin Hoffman (who, like his co-stars Robert DeNiro and Anne Heche, was never better, and, like Levinson, a nonentity since), who insists “this was never about Bill Clinton.”

Because, well, his good friend Barry would never do such a thing.

Which is bull hockey and Hollywood-speak for “I’d like to keep working.”

The entire world knew it was about Clinton–and what a hapless, helpless tool he was–the minute it was released. It was about that, even if Bill Clinton never crossed anyone’s mind from first conference to final wrap. That’s how art works. sometimes, even in Hollywood.

All concerned saved their careers (such as they’ve been) by distancing themselves from this reality soon and loudly, then rinsing and repeating as necessary. Self-denial is a privilege of the self-deluded and Levinson and crew started practicing a version of what they had so acutely pilloried–wiping the blood off the knife–as soon as what was left of decency permitted.

Too bad. Because either the film is on the money–in perfect concert with the observable reality it dismembers with a surgeon’s skill–or it’s nothing.

I just watched it again last night.

Believe me, it’s not nothing.

The quality that struck with extra force this time around (the pantsing of fake news and Heche’s pixie face, whether in deep background or loving closeup, contorting into every possible nuance of sycophancy, including self-contempt, still registering mind you) was the completeness with which Levinson and his principal screenwriter, David Mamet, limned the real crisis point, which is the separation of the movers and shakers from anything and everything except the art of moving and shaking.

The back rooms and underground bunkers in Wag the Dog are so far back and so deep under that their inhabitants are cut off from any reality except their own desperate desire to maintain their status in the only world that matters: theirs.

They’ll do literally anything–just don’t banish them to the sunlight. Their only angst–which can be pitied or sneered at according to taste–is the thought of failing, punching the dread ticket out, which is why Hoffman’s signature line “This is nothing!” keeps getting funnier when it should be getting tired.

After all, what happens to people like this when they lose their agency?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Better to laugh…harder.

The narrative trick that keeps bringing me back, though, is that somebody–Levinson? Mamet? Hoffman? The God of Hosts?–gave an unexpected poignancy to Hoffman’s Stanley Motss (the “t” is silent!), forever worried about the one thing the inhabitants of the secret world (which, out here in the real world a generation later, everybody has taken to calling “the deep state”) cannot worry about, which is proper credit. (In this way, he’s predictive of James Comey, a man who couldn’t draw sympathy from his mother.)

And the effect is all the more powerful for being called down by a character you would hate if you met him in real life and your religion didn’t require you to seek the good in him.

The beauty of Hoffman’s performance is that his character has somehow retained the innocence Heche’s Winifred Ames, who starts out thinking she’s going to learn the little bit she doesn’t already know, spends the movie losing with astonished gusto, and De Niro’s Conrad Brean lost a thousand years ago.

Wag the Dog moves like music. You could probably watch it twenty times in a row and still hear new things in it, like picking up a bass line that moves a bridge after you’e heard a favorite record a hundred times. I don’t know if it’s the best movie made in the last twenty-five years but it’s the best movie made about the last twenty-five years. Or the next twenty-five.

After that, it’ won’t matter, and whether Trump fails to survive the summer or cruises to a 2020 landslide won’t either.

The boat has sailed.

Goodbye us!

The only fault this movie has is they didn’t know which tune to close with. But, hey, that’s what I’m here for…

At the top, at least ,the eighties were a strong decade on film. With the possible exception of 1987, every one of these films would have been strong contenders in just about any year of the previous two decades, about whom few have been heard to complain. 1980 and 1983 were as good as it gets.

Some time in the distant past when I used to listen to sports talk radio (and boy is that time getting to be distant), I heard a segment where a bunch of junior noncoms in the Dead Brain Cell Count Brigade opined about movies they could literally sit down and watch anytime.

The DBCCB being what it is, Die Hard came up a lot.

Nothing against Die Hard, which I like, but I always thought I could do better ….so, being, as they say, snobby but not runny snobby:

The Thirties:

Carefree (1939, D. Mark Sandrich)

As many have noted, more a screwball comedy than a musical. As not enough have noted, a first class screwball comedy. And while it may not be a musical, strictly speaking, it does have Ginger doing “The Yam,” my favorite five minutes of film. My second favorite five minutes is Ginger, hypnotized, running loose with a shotgun, muttering “Shoot him down like a dirty dog!” while Luella Gear explains to Jack Carson that “It’s probably one of the silly rules.”

The Forties:

Colorado Territory (1949, D. Raoul Walsh)

Walsh’s superior remake of his own High Sierra, the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star. It’s easier to have sympathy for a western outlaw than a modern sociopath (even if the sociopath has had the rough edges smoothed away for the box office). Joel McCrea’s at his very best as a man looking for a second chance in the same wrong place he lost the first one, and VIrginia Mayo makes for one fetching half-breed. Plus it’s a heist flick, always a plus in my book.

The Fifties:

Rear Window (1954, D. Alfred Hitchcock)

Top drawer Hitchcock of course. It’s not so much remembered now, but this sat in the vaults for decades before being restored and re-released to theaters in the eighties. I took my mom to see it and, every time Grace Kelly came on the screen she would murmur, “Isn’t she so-o-o-o-o-o beautiful!” I could hardly disagree, but I thought I would go back a week or two later and watch it by myself, just to see what it was like without the sound effects. Met a girl from work in the lobby and, since we were both there by ourselves, it would have been rude not to sit together. First time Grace Kelly came on the screen: “Isn’t she so-o-o–o-o beautiful!” Interestingly enough, we spent the time before the movie mostly talking about a girl in our office who actually was the only woman I’ve ever known who was as beautiful as Grace Kelly in Rear Window, and had just quit to move back to Orlando. I found out a year or so later that she had wanted to date me, in part because I was the kind of guy who took his mother to the movies….Oh, wait. You thought I was gonna talk about the movie? Come on. You know about the movie. Hitchcock’s serious side and his comic side, perfectly married. That’s the movie.

The Sixties:

El Dorado (1967, D. Howard Hawks)

This is probably my all-time “anytime” movie. It’s a not-that-loose remake of Hawks’ Rio Bravo, which everybody, including me, knows is “superior.” But there’s nothing in Rio Bravo I’d trade for the hour in the middle when John Wayne and Robert Mitchum are just a couple of roughnecks trying to keep law and order in a cowtown while Wayne keeps seizing up from the effects of a bullet in his back and Mitchum–with so little polish on him you can smell the whiskey, if not the vomit–is trying to dry out in time to dodge the next bullet. And if that’s not entertaining enough, I can always sit and ponder the mysteries of a universe where Michele Carey could smoke that many holes in the screen and fail to become a star.

Not a movie. Okay, but there’s enough plot for three movies and it never gets resolved or leaves you wishing it would. People ask me what my favorite television series is and I say The Rockford Files. People ask me what my second favorite television series is and I say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.” Pick to click: “Let me get this straight: You have a client who has the same name as Herman Goering’s house?”

The Eighties:

Midnight Run (1988, D. Martin Brest)

Way funnier than Die Hard, and the action sequences are no sillier. I’m not sold on Robert De Niro’s serious mode. (The whole Brando school leaves me…bemused.) But there’s never been a better comic actor. Not even Cary Grant. Matched here by the entire cast, including Charles Grodin, who I can usually take only in the smallest doses.

The Nineties:

Wag the Dog (1997, D. Barry Levinson)

Preston Sturges for the Age of the Security State and a road movie to boot. We forget. That’s the only explanation for a world where this movie exists and you still have people running around crediting the CIA–or, better yet, “the intelligence community”–as a reliable source. Comic genius from Dustin Hoffman, the aforementioned Mr. De Niro and Anne Heche, as the Girl Friday from both Heaven (oh, the efficiency) and Hell (she doesn’t care the job or the master, she just wants to serve someone and, buddy, you better be it).

The Current Millenia:

I know we are in the second decade of the new millennia, but it hasn’t been the sort of millennia that produces a lot of things worth revisiting. Forget two, I’m surprised there’s one.

Knight and Day (2010 D. James Mangold)

That’s the whole movie right there. Two people who are amazed by each other. One’s a superspy and the other likes to work on cars. Guess which is which? This is almost enough to make me forgive James Mangold for his wretched remake of 3:10 to Yuma. Almost.